


Castle Pranks

by themadlurker



Category: Merlin (BBC)
Genre: Community: camelot_fleet, Gen, Humor, Pranks and Practical Jokes, Revelation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-09-06
Updated: 2009-09-06
Packaged: 2017-10-08 05:24:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/73140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themadlurker/pseuds/themadlurker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Merlin and Morgana team up to give Arthur a hard time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Castle Pranks

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [miakun](http://miakun.livejournal.com)'s prompt: "PRANKS. I would like Pranks in the Castle. Maybe Merlin and Morgana practicing magic by messing with Arthur?"

At first it was subtle.

One day, as he was riding out to hunt with some of his knights, Arthur felt something scratching his left ankle. He bent down in the saddle to fish it out and discovered a scrap of parchment saying:

"Ouch, that had to hurt!"

The next instant he rode straight into a tree branch.

He interrogated Merlin about it while his servant stood over him, gasping with laughter, and the knights pretended not to notice anything by talking loudly about a nearby tree. But in the end, Arthur had to admit that even if Merlin had been going around wedging bits of sheepskin into Arthur's boots, there was no way he could have known about the tree branch, so he only muttered darkly about stocks and rotten vegetables and servants who find indignities practised upon their masters amusing.

* * *

That night, as he dined with Morgana and his father, Arthur found himself repeatedly... missing things. Whenever he reached for his knife he found it precisely two inches from where he had left it. Each time he lifted his cup to his mouth, he found it empty, only to see the wine wink at him enticingly as soon as he set it down. Morgana smiled serenely at him from across the table.

He glanced suspiciously at Morgana, whose plate occasionally seemed to have acquired extra portions of his favourite dishes, but he never saw her make any movements to snatch morsels from his plate the way she had done when they were children. It was all very bewildering.

Still, he held his peace, even as his father raised a disapproving eyebrow at Arthur's fumbling attempts to eat a bowl of stew that seemed to relocate every time he reached for it. After all, he wasn't at all certain that he wasn't imagining the whole thing, and he didn't particularly want to be sent to Gaius to have his head examined.

* * *

The next time Arthur went hunting, and had to step behind a tree to relieve himself, he noticed, half-way through, that someone had scratched into the bark, a little below the belt, the words:

I ALWAYS KNEW YOU WERE COMPENSATING FOR SOMETHING

He glanced around wildly, looking for signs of a malicious sorcerer waiting in ambush...

The trees looked at him skeptically.

He watched Merlin closely when he returned to the hunting partly, but he seemed genuinely unconscious of what had happened. And Merlin had never fully mastered the art of false innocence.

Besides, that particular style of humour reminded him of someone else entirely... only, she hadn't ridden out with them.

Later, he thought he spotted a stray leaf caught in Morgana's hair and his eyes narrowed in speculation.

* * *

He spent the next week hearing faint voices that seemed to follow him around. For the most part he couldn't make out what they were saying, although the words "royal prat" did seem to surface intelligibly now and then. The first few times, he hollered out, "MERLIN!" at the top of his lungs, but his servant was never anywhere in the vicinity. The exclamation was such a common one in Camelot that no one took much notice until the unusual frequency of the exclamations began to draw attention.

Arthur tried to ignore it, but ended up muttering to himself venomously by the end of the day.

* * *

Stranger and stranger things kept happening around Arthur - at least, Arthur could have sworn they did, but all that anyone else seemed to notice was that the Crown Prince had been acting very odd lately, and suddenly he found that people were giving him a very wide berth when he went out in public. Morgana told him he was being paranoid when he expressed this view to her, but Arthur _knew_ it wasn't respect or awe that made people jump backwards an average of three feet whenever he entered the room.

Merlin just said, "hmm," and made a disparaging remark about Arthur's personal hygiene.

"In which case, this whole thing is almost certainly your fault, Merlin, because it is _your job_ to see to these things."

Arthur ordered him to re-wash all of his royal wardrobe as punishment, but he also began sniffing subtly at his sleeves before entering a room.

Guinevere caught him at it outside Morgana's chambers and gave him a look that he could only, for the sake of his sanity, interpret as sympathetic.

It all came to a head one day when Arthur found himself unexpectedly in pursuit of a thief who had made a foolish and desperate attempt to escape justice by way of the castle kitchens. Arthur had just given the man into custody of the head cook - a woman far more menacing than most of his knights - when a very full, very large tureen of day-old soup that seemed to have been balanced precariously and - if one were to be geometrically analytical about it - impossibly above the lintel of the door up-ended itself with perfect accuracy over his princely head.

The kitchen froze in a tableau of horror as Arthur reached up and gently extracted the dish from his head, feeling liquefied cabbage dribbling down behind his ears.

A sudden wave of calm and contentment washed over him as held the clay soup dish in his hands, because just as it had hit his head, a number of tangled ideas that had been troubling him incessantly for the past weeks suddenly arranged themselves into perfect order.

He was utterly unsurprised to find Merlin and Morgana convulsed with laughter in her rooms, so he simply closed the door behind him and said, pointing to each in turn:

"You, Morgana, can see the future in your dreams and you, Merlin, have been putting on an appallingly implausible charade of _not_ being a very powerful sorcerer. And I hope you are both thoroughly ashamed of yourselves for using your abilities in this profitless and malicious manner."

Merlin and Morgana both took on a stunned, alarmed look for about ten seconds. After that, they dissolved again into gales of laughter, Morgana clutching her breast as if having heart palpitations and Merlin pointing at the spot where Arthur stood dripping soup onto the floor. Arthur crossed his arms and did his best to look menacing.

A cabbage leaf fell out of his hair with a loud _splat_.

Arthur was very, very seriously tempted to have them both executed on the spot.

But among the things that had been knocked loose in his head by the soup tureen were the number of times when Morgana had warned him to be careful and the thought of her concern had encouraged him to extra caution - sometimes to the benefit of saving his life - and the number of times when Merlin had tagged along on a dangerous quest and returned looking bizarrely self-satisfied, as if he had actually done something to _help_ instead of just standing there like a log.

So Arthur thought that he could forgive them their laughter, this time, because he knew that they would always come through for him when it mattered - and because the humiliation of the past weeks was almost worth it when he saw the look on Morgana's face when she got hit by a handful of wet cabbage leaves.

* * *

Gwen found them a few hours later collapsed on the floor of Morgana's bedroom, surrounded by cabbage leaves and flinging half-hearted insults at each other. She marched them out of the castle like naughty children to wash the soup residue off under the pump. Everyone who saw this was overwhelmed with awe at her authoritative bearing and people started calling her the Queen of Camelot whenever Uther wasn't around.


End file.
